Chewy

People are friendly, with lots of opportunities to build things.

While I had a good time working with my team and stakeholders, I ultimately decided to leave due to three main reasons:

Company Culture: People seem to be very lax. I spent a lot of time following up with people to get them to respond to emails and Slack conversations. People do not respect meeting times; there were lots of late cancellations and meetings being pushed out. People are not held accountable for delays in launches and timelines. When I tried to get partners to adhere to promised timelines, I was retaliated against, with false feedback provided to my manager. I was also informed that holding people accountable was an "earns trust" issue and would be a blocker for my promotion. The only solution provided was that I should air out my grievances in a common meeting, not something I was comfortable with, given I had raised this as an HR concern and there was retaliation involved.

Leadership: It became more and more clear to me that the leadership is not strong. There was no vision or strong charters around any team. The strategy was reactive, and engineers got moved between teams as stakeholder priorities changed. The leadership is not strong enough to push back and does not have a vision of what they are building towards. I started with 6 engineers on my team and ended with 3, none due to attrition. Everyone was moved to other teams. Further, there is no avenue to provide feedback. My feedback was never sought, and my skip-level manager always canceled 1:1s last minute or never showed up to the meeting. I also got no visibility with leaders, except for when I was delivering bad news. It felt like I was taking on all the work, and someone else was getting the recognition.

Technical Aptitude: Chewy claims it is a tech organization, but their tech is way behind the times. Most of it is built with no thought towards scale, and everything built last year was being re-architected the following year. There is little to no insight from senior-level engineers, and people I worked with constantly made short-term decisions. They did not take advice and feedback well, and it very much felt like the message was to stay in your own lane. Further, the leadership is completely oblivious to what they own. My manager had little knowledge of how things worked and made no effort to learn. This led to constantly being asked the same basic questions every week, and several pointless meetings and processes.

I really wanted this to work, but I saw no career growth given the environment. I had a lot of people who reported to me leave during my time, and I was told that a lot of this is systemic.